


in that quiet vacant dark

by firebreathing_bitchqueen



Series: Midnight at the Mandragora (and other stories) [4]
Category: The Wayhaven Chronicles (Interactive Fiction)
Genre: F/M, Falling In Love, Fluff, Inspired by Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:21:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27811417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firebreathing_bitchqueen/pseuds/firebreathing_bitchqueen
Summary: Holland comes to an important realization.
Relationships: Female Detective/Nathaniel "Nate" Sewell
Series: Midnight at the Mandragora (and other stories) [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2002582
Comments: 7
Kudos: 16





	in that quiet vacant dark

**Author's Note:**

> It's read poetry and have soft feelings for Holland and Nate hours, y'all.

_In that quiet vacant dark_   
_I looked into his mystic eyes,_   
_found such longing that my heart_   
_fluttered impatient in my breast._

_In that quiet vacant dark_   
_I sat beside him punch-drunk,_   
_his lips released desire on mine,_   
_grief unclenched my crazy heart._

From _Deevar_ (The Wall), by Forugh Farrokhzad, translated by Sholeh Wolpé.

**_early morning, the warehouse kitchen_ **

She found him, as she always seemed to at this hour, reading in the kitchen, long legs stretched out in front of him, neatly crossed at the ankles. By the time she’s stepped into the warm, low light of the kitchen from the dark of the hallway, he’s already standing, book set aside. Another breath and he’s halfway across the room, halfway to her, in a few strides, quiet concern clear on his face.

“More nightmares?” he asked, reaching out to tuck a stray pale curl behind her ear. She felt steadied already, her axis feeling righted in his orbit. She inhaled, sighed, let herself focus on the immediate sensations, to stay in the present, to feel his fingers light as breath across her brow, then tracing the shell of her ear, the side of her throat, coming to rest along her shoulder, pressing just firmly enough to ground her. He rubbed his thumb along her collarbone for a moment, studying her face, the tired downturn of her mouth, before pulling her against him.

Holland let herself sag against Nate’s chest, breathing in the warm scent of him. He already smelled like _home_ , and she felt some of the weariness and constriction in her chest loosen as she wrapped her arms around his waist and nestled her face against him. She wondered vaguely if she should be concerned that she felt so soothed by him, that she was letting her heart carve out a home in another person but, for the moment, she decided she was too tired to care, couldn’t bring herself to pull back from his warmth, from his hands smoothing against her hair.

Still leaning against him, she tilted her chin up to smile at him. It was tired, but it was there. “Hi.”

“Hi.” He leaned down, kissed the top of her head. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not especially.” Her smile faltered into something like a grimace.

“Okay,” he said into her hair, his lips still pressed to the top of her head. “Whatever you need.” He tightened his hold on her briefly, then pulled away to gesture to the table where he’d been sitting. “Here, you sit. Let me get you a coffee.”

“It’s too late for coffee,” she mumbled unconvincingly around a yawn, moving across the kitchen to sink into one of the chairs on the far side of the table, closest to the wall, drawing her bare feet up into the seat and wrapping her arms around her legs to rest her chin on her knees.

“Would you prefer tea? Or I think I have decaf somewhere.”

She scowled. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just offer me _decaf_.”

“I’m sorry?” He chuckled.

“It’s only an abomination.” She wrinkled her nose. “I will accept regular coffee, because I can’t say no to coffee.” _Or to you,_ she thought. 

The welcome aroma of coffee, warm and sweetly spiced, soon filled the kitchen, tendrils of steam curling out of the little mokka pot on the hob. Holland smiled a little to herself, feeling a funny, squeezing kind of feeling in her chest as she watched him, along with a sense of profound gratitude. Perhaps exhaustion had made her uncharacteristically sentimental. Perhaps.

Her smile widened as Nate returned to the table with a steaming mug of coffee, which he gently placed in front of her before taking the seat beside her, turning to face her.

“You know black coffee would have been fine,” she said, reaching out for the mug, which was full of cream and – if the scent was anything to go off – cinnamon sugar, replete with an actual cinnamon stick.

She wrapped both hands around the mug and took a long sip, breathing in deeply, letting her eyes flutter shut momentarily. “But this is _wonderful_ , thank you.”

She opened her eyes and smiled softly, twisting in her chair to face him, resting her back against the wall next to her. Balancing the steaming mug carefully on her knees, she unbent her legs just enough to stretch across the few inches between them, balancing her toes on the edge of his chair. Carefully, as though they were made of something precious and fragile, he drew her bare feet into his lap, fingers loosely circling her ankles. His hands on against the tops of her feet were warm and solid and she was real again. She wondered, nonsensically, if this was how the velveteen rabbit had felt, when its soft fabric covering had been mostly rubbed away in motley patches, just before it had become Real. Lately, she found herself feeling as if large patches of her own shiny coating had been worn down, disintegrating every moment. She wondered if the velveteen rabbit had felt _least_ real just before his metamorphosis. Perhaps that’s all this was for her, too. 

“Your feet are freezing,” he noted, clasping them a little tighter.

“They always are.” Her mouth flexed into something like a shrug, too straight-lined to be a proper smile, but something like it just the same.

And then, for awhile, neither of them spoke. He held her ankles and she sipped her coffee, stirring the cinnamon stick around the mug idly and feeling the cold, distant hinterlands of her mind tethered by the warmth and immediacy of strong, sweet coffee and his hands on the tops of her feet.

“You know,” he said eventually, “I don’t think I ever thanked you, for that night at the carnival. That first night,” he clarified when she raised an eyebrow. “In the Hall of Mirrors.”

She was halfway through the cup of coffee, its sweet heat thawing the chill clutching in her throat, as if her insides were slowly becoming Real again, too. “That was _months_ ago. Not that you needed to thank me in the first place, I mean,” she fumbled, “I didn’t do anything. I couldn’t do anything.” She fell silent again.

“But you did,” he said, quiet and earnest, with a quick, emphatic squeeze of his fingers around her ankles.

She looked up at him then, light eyes fixed on dark ones, another touchstone anchoring her to the present moment.

“You were there. When I felt like I wasn’t,” he said simply, keeping his eyes on hers, thumbs rubbing along the shallow dips just behind her ankle bones, those hollow places bracketing the thick cord of some tendon. Achilles tendon? Was that colloquial or actually what it was called? How appropriate.

He didn’t say anything else, and she didn’t say anything at all, for what felt like a long time. What could she say? What could be said by anyone at all? She just kept looking at him, hoping he understood…what? She wasn’t sure she understood what it was, exactly, she wanted him to understand, but she hoped he did.

She had not seen this coming. Not in the way she thought she would. She had always thought — not totally consciously, perhaps, but thought nonetheless — that she would know before it happened, even if it were only just before, with no time to stop it. The sound of the soft catch of the floodgates coming unlatched before they were swept wide open.

The reckless, whirling, dizzying vertigo of hope. The trapdoor dropping, twisting knife of want. The strange, unbalanced dissonance of the right now, of living in an unreal moment in the only moment that was ever real, the present now suspended between the what-ifs of before and beyond.

She thought about high school, long summer afternoons spent at the quarry, long abandoned, just outside of Wayhaven, some miles into the forest borderlands unincorporated into any particular municipality. The sheer cliffs of it, forming a rocky cauldron of the coldest, darkest water she’d ever felt, an icy plunge from the cliffs’ edges that caught your breath and gave it back to you all at once, an exhilarating seizure of muscles that seemed to shoot straight into your bones and stay there for hours after in some thrilling, icy core, seemingly impervious to the glaring heat of sun on your back when you picnicked on the rocks from which you’d just flung yourself.

Even thinking about it now, she could remember exactly how it felt to leap, every single time. Remembered telling herself it was totally safe. That it was just like the high dive at the neighborhood pool. That basic physics and the irresistible pull of gravity would propel her body away from the jagged edges of the cliffs and into the center of the quarry pool. That she was only in danger of getting icy water up her nose, or (as she did once) fantastically bruising her hip and the back of her thigh when she stretched out and smacked against the unforgiving water.

And she had always seen it coming, the free fall, even when she scrunched her eyes shut the second her feet left the ground. Even when she tried to talk herself out of jumping (or, more frequently, had to talk herself into it, into ignoring the basic instinct to not willingly leap off a cliff), she knew what was about to happen.

She’d never not known she was falling. She’d never hit the water and wondered, “Oh, what’s all this, then? When did this happen?”

The free fall rush of cliff-diving was like any other kind of falling, or so she’d assumed, based on her others points of reference. Even the more low stakes, less literal kinds of falling, like falling ill, or falling asleep. Sometimes it happened unexpectedly quickly, but there were always little indicators that the descent was imminent.

She’d assumed, however unconsciously, that anything described as “falling” would happen, would feel similarly. That falling, as an action, had certain shared, universally recognized characteristics. The way animals could sense an impending earthquake, somehow feeling the tiniest, slowest shift of tectonic plates deep underground. Feeling the fault before the fault line was ever reached. Seeing the waves sweep back from the shore before the tsunami wave. The clacking shudder of pebbles on a train track well before the chugging and whistling of the freight.

She had assumed falling in love would share these qualities, these little harbingers of Something About to Happen. Where her brain and her body and her senses would catch the frisson of _something_ sparking in the air, the way you could sometimes feel the pressure shift before a big storm.

She had assumed it would feel extraordinary. Because love _was_ extraordinary, when you really thought about it. Finding resonant echoes of yourself in another person, and having them answered in kind. The idea that this could happen at all, let alone more than once, when you considered all the ways people can love each other — it was improbable at _best_. Didn’t it warrant some kind of pomp and circumstance? Some kind of flashing lights indicator? Something?

But there’d been nothing of the kind. No tiny fluctuations in her magnetic field. No shudder of pebbles on a train track. No feeling of a free fall. No thudding impact, either, no feeling of having hit the ground. Falling in love did not, as it turned out, feel anything except entirely, wonderfully ordinary, powerful in its own strange, mundane magic. Like perfectly worn-in jeans, or waking up with the sun on a day off and knowing you could lie in bed for hours with a whole day stretching out languorously, luxuriously ahead of you. Like a long walk on the first truly warm day of spring after a too-damp, too-long winter.

Like waking alone in the dark from another predictably terrible dream to find that you weren’t alone, not really: that there was a touchstone, bright and warm and solid, ready to tether you back to reality with cinnamon coffee and warm hands and easy silence. You had to make a home out of somewhere. Why shouldn’t it be another person?

He was still looking at her, still idly rubbing her ankles. Not expecting anything of her. Just sitting with her through each passing moment.

She took another sip of coffee. Let her eyes shift from his face to the book he’d been reading before she’d interrupted him. Smiled at him. “So, what were you reading, earlier?”

She watched him blink, once, trying to find the thread she’d decided to follow. Then he smiled back at her. “Ah, poetry. Forugh Farrokhzad.”

“Would you read some to me?”

He tilted his head, eyes searching her face for a scant moment before, apparently, finding whatever he’d been looking for.

“Of course,” he said, and released one of her ankles to reach for the discarded text on the table.


End file.
